3 Ways to Make Your Clients Stick Around

You may think your best customers are the ones who never talk to you and auto-renew every year. But in reality, you’re likely to lose those customers the second they find a better deal elsewhere.

Your best customers are the ones you interact with regularly—the ones who understand exactly what you’re doing for them. Those are the customers who will not only stick around for life, but also refer their friends and family.

1) Stay in touch. Don’t wait for your customers to call you with a problem or question. Instead, look for opportunities to reach out to them several times a year. Ideally, those contacts should be positive ones. For example, you might send an e-card to your business customers on the anniversary of the day they started their businesses.

Regular contact with customers accomplishes several things. First, it gives you a chance to see which customers are on the verge of leaving so you can intervene. If you can catch problems early, you’re much more likely to nip them in the bud.

Second, staying in touch keeps your business at the forefront of your customer’s mind. If one of your customers is speaking with a friend and the friend mentions they’re looking for insurance, your customer is more likely to think of referring you if you’ve spoken with them recently.

Third, it gives you a chance to uncover information that could affect the customer’s policy. When a customer makes a change to their business or buys a new piece of business property, it might not occur to them to report those changes to you. But if you keep in touch regularly, you can take the opportunity to ask what’s new in their business.

Note, however, that there’s a fine line between maintaining a dialogue and pestering your customers. The trick is to come up with meaningful reasons to initiate a conversation.

2) Get smart about technology. Advances in artificial intelligence and other forms of robotic process automation have produced incredible products and services that can help you provide better customer experience.

Some bots can give your customers 24/7 support, while others can streamline your email list management and manage customer follow-up. The cost is far lower than you’d pay an employee to handle those tasks, which means you’ll end up saving money in the long-term. Don’t disappoint your customers and damage your bottom line by limiting yourself to manual processes.

3) Visibly add value. Most, if not all, of your customers have no idea what you’re doing for them behind the scenes. Also, many of your customers have likely bought insurance without ever having contact with a human being. If they think of insurance as something that happens automatically, how can they possibly value all the work you put into providing it for them?

While you don’t want to spell it out to your customers every time you perform a task for them, it’s a good idea to educate your customers about what’s involved with setting up their policies. This could be as simple as briefly describing three policies that might fit their needs and then explaining why a certain insurer is best.

Such discussions not only show you know your stuff, but also prove you’re putting real time and effort into the service they’re paying for.